Sep 21, 2014

The new GeForce GTX 980 graphics card from NVIDIA is not powered by the best possible Maxwell graphics processing unit, since the company is holding the GM200/GM210 in reserve.

However, it still outperforms every other NVIDIA single-GPU card, including the GTX 780 Ti that has certain advantages. Some reviews say so at least. It appears that professional overclockers decided to see for themselves just what the new GM204-400 GPU could do. Fast forward to the present time and voila! K|NGP|N and TiN have not only confirmed that the GTX 980 is an “overclocking monster,” but they even used it to set new records in 3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme benchmark. The scores were of over 19,000 and 9,000, respectively. The actual video card used was not a reference version, but the one from EVGA. They were able to push the GPU to above 2,050 MHz.

To give you some perspective, the normal performance of the GTX 980 is 1,126 MHz base / 1,216 MHz GPU Boost. We're pretty sure that this record won’t last for very long, but we may still be surprised. Many of the records set by K|NGP|N often last until he himself breaks them later.

Press Release:

EVGA, K|NGP|N and TiN have once again broken new records with the new EVGA GeForce GTX 980. Armed with liquid nitrogen, the latest EVGA hardware including an EVGA X99 FTW motherboard, 1600W power supplies and an EVGA GeForce GTX 980 running at over 2050MHz, K|NGP|N was able to set new records on 3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme, breaking 19,000 and 9,000 barrier in each benchmark."The Maxwell GPU in the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 is an overclocking monster," said Vince "K|NGP|N" Lucido. "There is a ton of headroom on the GPU and Memory clocks, and performance scaling is some of the highest I have ever seen. Internally we have hit the highest clocks ever achieved on a GPU.""The power efficiency of the new GPUs allow for higher overclocking with lower power consumption, even on air cooling," said Illya "TiN" Tsemenko. "The fact that it is not so demanding on power consumption, allows you to achieve clockspeeds that were not possible before on a reference power design."